I realize it's too late for major design decisions, but I thought I'd just ask if you are designing as if it's going to be underwater in the ocean? That's the model I use to judge whether my electronics will survive. Of course, I take shortcuts like anyone with a budget and time constraints.

If nothing else, make sure your controller is protected. I can't tell if the LED strips are waterproof or not. I would recommend encasing them in polyethylene tubing as it provides a physical impact barrier, a waterproof covering, and it diffuses the lightÂ â€” of course, that would mean a half a mile of tubing and I doubt you've got a few grand to spare.

As for connectors, I have had luck with cheap, basic ones including DB-25, RJ-14, RJ-45, 1/4" headphone, etc. I just seal the insides with a glob of silicone so, even if the dust tends to screw up the connector, at least it won't get inside the enclosure.

I have a theory about cooling that I'm going to try out: the double-sink heat exchanger. The idea is to put a heat sink on the inside and outside of the box with a good thermal coupling. A fan inside keeps the heat flowing to the inner sink, and a fan on the outside draws that heat away from the outer sink. I had considered filtered air for cooling, but the double-sink approach seems safer ... if also much less efficient.

Yeah well I am going with not quite that extreme an approach but close. The RGB LED strips are submersible water proof (encased in silicon tubing). With that said the connectors are not. I have not considered how to seal up the connections just yet but the arches will each be preassembled prior to arriving on the playa and I will likely just encase the connection with duct tape (put plastic around the connection then duct tape folded onto itself. Then each one of the processors will have it own plastic box and all wires leaving that box with silicone as you suggested. If we go with the arduino's they don't get too hot and it will only be running at night. So not sure cooling is necessary. I will certainly find out testing this in tucson mid day in the summer time 100+ degrees. I shall see how that works and if need be build some heat sinks but I hope not since there are 100+ processors at this point. The power supplies I am building boxes for and then putting a heat pump air filter on it with a cpu case fan to force circulation.

Thanks for the advice, I definitely want it to last throughout the event, barring people destroying it. Thanks for your support! I cannot wait to show it to you in August!!!

Yeah, that's what I was thinking of. Honextly everything I have seen on the playa that lasts until the end of the event was built to withstand 1000 baboons climbing on it. At least bring spares for repair.

Thanks Lonestoner! I am thinking that maybe as we get closer to the event, we can start coordinating the possibility. Free t-shirts for volunteers? We shall see! Thanks for showing interests. I love the burner community!!!

Just put in about 30 hours this weekend trying to get everything up to par for Saguaro Man our AZ Regional Event starting Thursday. I did not get the cross member holes drilled on the arches and really have not had time to work on too many other patterns right now. But did make this cool little video for you to check out! The LED strips come in these rolls and I don't have room for 20 arches in my kitchen but I need to get them all hooked up to make sure they work.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N88c2wBBDxU[/youtube]

We are doing pretty good on our Kickstarter page http://kck.st/eDaZyQ but we really do need a lot more than our goal on there to get the full set up out to the playa. I hope you can find a few dollars to help us out.

I cannot thank you all enough for your support! This is an amazing journey I am on. Don't think I really knew what I was in for here, but I promise I am working hard to make something spectacular and I know in the end it will be an incredible sight to see you all playing in the light!

woo hoo we have reached and surpassed our Kickstarter $6000 goal and will receive our funding for this fund raising campaign! *happy dance* We still need to continue fund raising but its relieving to have hit the initial goal and know we should get some funding from our Kickstarter!

Here is a picture of of the 20 arches up and running at Saguaro Man. This is 1/5 of the entire tunnel and it was a beautiful sight!

Its been 5 days since we have received any kickstarter donations :( I expected a huge drop off after the rapture on Saturday but nothing like we are experiencing now. I realize our Kickstarter page says we have reached our goal but we are far from the amount of funding we need to bring 100 arches to the playa. As it stands at our current funding point on Kickstarter we will be able to get to 60 arches. Each arch costs about $145 so that is about another $5800 need to complete the project.... and that does not even cover any transport costs... I am willing to eat dirt for the rest of the summer to ensure we get it THERE but need you help to get it to the playa in all its glory. Everyone that has seen TToQE up and running agrees this is going to be one of the "talked about" projects from Burning Man this year... so please consider helping us out. The sooner we get funding the more time we will have to create a better TToQE. Thanks for all who have supported us so far! Please know we are working hard to create this amazing ART for YOU!
[url]
http://kck.st/eDaZyQ[/url]

We have 6 days left for our Kickstarter and still need another $5k to get to 100 arches. With the current level of donations, we will be bringing 60 arches. Please spread the word and help us bring The Tunnel of Questionable Enlightenment to the playa in all its glory! The less time we have to spend fund raising means more time working on the project!
[url]
http://kck.st/eDaZyQ[/url]

I know this one is not as good as the first. I am running low on energy, time and creative juices. But here ya go! Lots of footage of our progress so far!
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E6F01qKzpbM&hd=1[/youtube]

Thanks for all the support so far! I really can't wait for you all to experience it!

Looking forward to bringing our pink elephant over to see the tunnel! It will be awesome. I hope it is closer to 5:30, because we are camped at 6:30?a with a 3-story tower, so the closer you are to us, the better the view from the third floor! See you there in 3 weeks!!!!!

Well the fund raiser was a huge success! Fortunately and unfortunately, the tunnel was having some issues. I managed to get up to 40 arches working but the whole system is locking up very frequently at that distance. But this is why we did it 2 weeks before we have to leave. You do full set up to find the problems here and not on the playa. Several ideas have been thrown around and we ARE going to fix it! We put the number of arches down to 20 just to demonstrate the new patterns and interactivity and it was working pretty solidly for long periods of time. The interactivity is ridiculous! Being able to "DJ" the lights with turn tables was awesome! Seeing some of the new patterns in the arches was incredible. I suppose there is going to be quite a line for a turn at it.

It was something like 110 degrees in Mesa on Saturday. Took us 6 hours to setup (going to be way longer on playa as we did not bury wires, generator lines, etc). It was pure hell to set the thing up, break it down and even more stressful when it went up and NOTHING happened when the power was finally turned ON. You just go into recovery mode an start working your way though it though. However, by the time things were working pretty good, I was completely fried. So sorry no video yet, but if you will be at Burning Man, you will see it! It will be there and it will be running at least on Monday and for longer provided people don't destroy it. We are going to try to put together a "sitters" list to watch the tunnel and ensure people don't mess it up. If you are out there, please tell people not to touch the lights, it will help prolong the longevity of the project. Wish I had more money to protect it better...maybe next year I'll get some funding...

Workinonit wrote:I managed to get up to 40 arches working but the whole system is locking up very frequently at that distance. But this is why we did it 2 weeks before we have to leave. You do full set up to find the problems here and not on the playa. Several ideas have been thrown around and we ARE going to fix it!

I spent the better part of a couple days on what turned out to be a rather silly problem. I just felt the need to hijack your thread to vent!

I'm using a PIC microcontroller to drive a chain of LED drivers (PCA9922, shift-register-style drivers with 1-resistor current setting). I started using the PIC's synchronous serial port feature for the first time to shift the data out, and I was getting bizarre results. I surmised a clock problem, but couldn't really decipher it as it was spurious and weirdly effected by oscilloscope probes. I barked up the wrong tree for a bit concerning the duty-cycle (which, on the PCA9922 spec sheet expects 40% to 60% although it can handle "0 to 25MHz".) Nonetheless, I finally determined that it must have been some RF noise as a capacitor rounded off the clocks enough to work perfectly. Well, sort-of ... it _works_ at least.

The project is a sick bit of elegance that should let me drive 50 (or more) RGB LED's (150 emitters) with 8-bit pulse-width modulated (PWM) resolution from a 20MHz-clocked PIC. And then do animation and processing on the side. I'm using a technique called bit-modulation for PWM which disassembles all the PWM values into bits, sets the shift registers to turn on all LED's with bit 7 set, sets all the output-enable pins for 128 cycles, then moves to bit 6 for 64 cycles, bit 5 for 32, and so-on. The effect is that over the course of 256 cycles, each LED is on for its PWM value's duration, except the processor only has to do heavy computing 8 times per those 256 cycles. I cheat a bit and don't get to 100% brightness because of fixed delays between cycles and such, but it's accurate enough.